Plug-in Media lead FlashForward into the VORTEX OF THE DAMNED!

Over the last few months we’ve been working like crazy little typing elves painstakingly crafting the new masthead for the FlashForward site. It’s such an honour to be asked, so we’ve put far more work into it than we allocated, in order to produce something we hope is a little bit special. 🙂

Plug-in's creative director Dominic Minns came up with the initial concept, which, like our own website, was heavily influenced by 50s B-Movie posters. We also liked the abstract nature of the title sequence of The Twilight Zone. So while he got to work drawing and animating disembodied typing hands, giant robots, brains in Flash branded jars (amongst other things) I started building prototypes for a mindbending 3D spiraling vortex.

We wanted it to have the effect of of a rotating spiral, you know the kind of effect you see in cartoon characters' eyes to show that they're being hypnotised 🙂 But I also wanted a kind of Doctor Who type space worm-hole type thing! And we'd just converted our Plug-in 3D engine into AS3 so it was the perfect opportunity to see what we could do with it!

I'll be explaining in much more detail step-by-step how we made it in later blog posts but for now check out the demo version above - click on it to see how the models work in wireframe.

Although you can see the full banner in all it's glory at www.flashforwardconference.com along with a full explanation from Dom and myself about the background thinking behind the banner on their blog.

Oh and really excited to be giving the AS3 version of my particles session! But more about that later...

[Update] apparently the banner crashes the new beta Flash plug-in... if anyone has any insight as to why this may happen, i'd be very grateful!

[Update] according to Tinic Uro they saw our banner and realised there is a bug in the beta release. They've fixed the bug internally and this will be implemented in the next release. Cool!